Actually, Itanium was a fairly good idea. That it didn't work out, could just as well be ascribed to politics and real-world issues, as to technical issues. For example, the requirements said it should be able to run x86 unmodified (why? if you want x86 you already know where to get it, right?). It was oversold (the next desktop processor), and underperformed (late delivery, bad performance). None of these issues indicate that explicit instruction level paralellism (EPIC) is a bad idea. And they certainly have good Itanium compilers now. The main problem with Itanium (apart from the initial delays) was that it was a solution in search of a problem. It still is. But what a marvellous solution!
I have always wondered why we have 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, 60 seconds in a minute and so on. What criteria were used to put these metrics in place?
Obviously for the same reason that there are 660 feet in one furlong, 128 fl.oz in one gallon, or 14 pounds in one stone. But remember that choosing 10 as a base multiplier between units is just as arbitrary, it just happens to be more convenient when our number base also happens to be 10. If I were to choose, I would rather change our numeric system to use base 12 (divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6), or 60 (divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, and 30) instead of 10 (divisible by 2 and 5).
By the way, when did time as we know it, begin?
I believe it's pretty common knowledge these days that time began at big bang. Assuming our theoretical physicists are on the right track, of course.
What would be the problem with metric time for example?
The same as the problem of changing units. Despite having officially converted to the metric system, americans still use fahrenheit, feet, and gallons.
Time is perhaps the most important measurement unit in modern life. You get up at 06:00, start work at 8:00, lunch at 11:00, and drive home at 16:00. During workday you have scheduled three meetings at 8:15, 9:30, and 14:30. You have dinner at 17:00, and drive your kids to football practice at 18:00. Your favourite tv show starts at 21:00, and you go to bed at 23:00. If you start using your own metric time, you are not making society more "efficient", instead you are efficiently leaving yourself outside it (the society, that is).
Re:Forget jumping from airplanes
on
Flying Humans
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· Score: 1
I want to see a flying suit where the guy makes it up off the ground, into the air, tools around and then comes back down in one piece. The rub, of course, is that the engines so far aren't up to the task of a vertical take-off and a horizontal take-off brings to mind someone on jet roller skates or a belly toboggan with wheels.
Or you could just jump off a high cliff (or bridge, or whatever). If it works from a plane, it works from a tall structure as well. The difficult part is still the landing.
The batsuit guys tend to be traveling way too fast for non-Evil Kinevel landing.
Absolutely. If the first one attempting a landing dies, there will probably be some time before the next one attempts the same thing. If he somehow manages to succeed, I can pretty much guarantee you that Darwin will claim dozens of people later. Travelling at these insane speeds, I guess the safest would be to go for a landing on a snow hill, like the one in the movie linked to in the writeup, where he passed some skiers. But it would be extremely difficult to keep some level of control at the critical moment where he stops flying and starts floating on snow instead. At these speeds, killing yourself is pretty easy.
The article, and the discussion, and the whole shebang, are meant for professionals, not ignoramuses like you and the dude you're defending.
You might be a professional with computers. But the reason Nokia isn't happy with the ogg format has nothing to do with computers. Technically speaking, ogg delivers lossy compressed audio with adequate compression and sound quality. The reason Nokia doesn't like it is for reasons outside your limited little technical universe. If you are unable to see that, you can't call yourself a professional in this context.
My mom doesn't know what MPEG2 compression is, but she still uses the DVD player I bought her.
Look. It's Ogg Vorbis. Ogg is the container. Vorbis is the format.
I don't care. I've never seen a.vorbis file. All I've ever seen is a.ogg file,.ogg files contain music that plays well on my computer, but unlike.mp3-files, not so well on my mp3-player.
If you can't handle that, if you think it's too geeky, please step away from your computer and smash it to bits, as you're far too stupid to deal with modern technology. Might I suggest a career in waste disposal?
Look, if you can't handle that 99% of the world just doesn't care about containers and codecs, but use the file extension to determine media format, you are seriously lacking in social intelligence, and need to be confined to live in solitude for the rest of your life. May I suggest a career in computers?
If you have a solution, please join one of the IRC channels or one of the mailing lists and enlighten us. "Code faster", "Stop trying," and "Release something that's not what you want to release nor meets your standards of quality or the reason you started this project," are unacceptable solutions.
Look, you can do whatever you want to do. I'm not in any way complaining about, or suggesting a better way, to do Perl6 development, as I have absolutely no stake in it, and just don't care anymore. I'm merely pointing out that the Perl6 crowd has, due to the second-system effect, painted themselves into the corner of irrelevancy. If some of the Perl6 people feel offended by that, that's ok by me, as I'm not afraid of offending someone, although it was not my goal in this case.
I'm shure you know what I was referring to. That one of them is open source and the other is not, is irrelevant in that respect (although I certainly consider the distinction important in other respects, but that was not what I was referring to). I doubt any Duke Nukem fans would be satisfied if 3D Realms released a version of the game as unfinished as the current version of Perl6, even if it was open source.
Look, I'm not against people having fun trying to make Perl6, I'm just a bit tired of hearing people advocating it, when there's still close to nothing to show for it after 7 years of planning and some rudimentary prototyping.
What is it that multiple dispatch solves that an if tree that detects object types doesn't do currently?
Nothing. A computer language is Turing-equivalent, regardless of object-orientedness, or multiple dispatch. Many people like object-oriented languages. Some of those people also happen to like multiple dispatch. Perl, and Perl6 needs to include everything and the kitchen sink, so therefore it also includes multiple dispatch. End of explanation.
People keep using asteroids and windows as examples but I still don't understand. I figure collisions would be a function of The Universe and window handling would be written as a function of, well, the window.
Just like you can always get by without OO, you can always get by without multiple dispatch. It just gets a bit more cumbersome at times. The standard method of getting by without multiple dispatch is to apply the Visitor Pattern. It is also a good place to start reading if you are trying to understand why people want multiple dispatch.
By the time Perl6 gets out, if it ever does, nobody will care about it because the open source market will be dominated by Mono.
Not everyone wants to suckle at the teat of Microsoft hanging out of a Novell uniform.
"Not everyone" does in no way contradict "be dominated by". In the limiting case, "not everyone" simply means that you will not use Mono, while everyone else does.
At this rate, the perl crew might be better served by just compiling down to MSIL and leveraging Mono for cross-language compilation.
Ideas are cheap. Let's see your code. You can find my Perl 6 code all over the Internet. Start with Parrot.
Mono is already here, and does useful stuff. I'm sure it's possible to do useful stuff with Parrot and Perl6 too, but so far nobody has done just that. Perl6 is the Duke Nukem Forever of computer languages.
It's just you who don't know how to use the tools, and stupidely ASSUME that people who are using vi or emacs are 'manually searching and replacing' (which is hilariously incorrect). YOU are probably doing that, and find it easier to do it with click-click and dialog boxes.
Well, I could draw you with pencil and paper the whole structure of any program I've worked on.
Actually, I think he had a point. I'm an emacs user myself, and I've certainly done my share of "manually searching and replacing" over the years. And when it comes to the majority of programs I'm working on, I rarely have any clue about what I'm doing, and can certainly not draw you a clarifying picture of anything but the very big picture. And that's the way it has to be when you are working on multiple projects with varying levels of integration. You rarely know more than one of them well.
IDE tools are just like GPS-interactive maps for taxi drivers - they're only useful if the people themselves are off-the-boat novices or hopelessly incompetent.
If you take a great Taxi-driver from Madrid, and put him into a the driver seat of a cab in Quebec, a GPS would be a big productivity booster. Not all of us have the luxury of working on the same program for all of our lives.
Great that it withstands multiple explosions, but people don't. How many explosions are you expecting to be in?
Isn't withstanding one explosion good enough? After the first one, should you really be in a position to get blown up again?
I'm sure the fabric will come with a warning label, containing text such as: "WARNING: Explosions are dangerous. Zetix fabrics will normally be able to offer limited protection of equipment from one or more explosions if used according to instructions supplied by Auxetix Inc, but we advice people to stay at a safe distance. Do not use explosives without proper training and certification. There is no warranty on this product. Auxetix Inc can not take responsibility for any damage that occurs as a result of manufacturing faults or wrong use."
I REALLY doubt the satellites running the phones have enough intelligence for P2P-type operation. Most communication satellites are fairly dumb transponders. They don't do much other than receive a signal on one frequency and rebroadcast it on another. This gives them a lot of flexibility over their lifetime.
Does it matter? The typical use-case for most people using satellite phone is communication between a remote area, and a not-so-remote area. The only benefit from p2p-satellites would be a (at least theoretically) shorter lag when two people using sat-phones are speaking to each other. I can't see that I have given the impression that sat-phones work this way either. The grand-grand-parent post seemed to have confused sat-phones with normal cell-phones, and that was what I responded to.
This also means that if the ground operations center goes down, those satellite phones will do precisely jack shit. Satellites are also susceptible to jamming and other denial of service attacks. Ham radio is more difficult to jam, and requires absolutely no infrastructure.
Actually, I'm a lot more concerned about satellites going down than ground-stations going down. Satellites are expensive, and they have a relatively short lifetime, so for economic reasons your phone may to stop working in the future. Ground-stations merely need an UPS to keep going. But yeah, you have a point, if you want to keep communicating over long distances after world war three causes almost total nuclear annihilation of the earth, lo-tech solutions are your best bet. Ham-radio is lo-tech.
Basically, what you are saying is that your parents should have checked something like this coverage page before they spent their money. It sounds like they bought Globalsat. They should have bought Iridium.
Yes they do. People have been using them for ages. Obviously they aren't perfect, but I sure would prefer to have a satellite phone to a smelly ham-operator.
the satelite phone system IRC is still based on the land line system and land based stations to work properly (the better to bill you my precious) little nextel cell walkie talkies ain't gonna cut it either if the base it out, the other problem is that when a disaster occurs and cell phones do work everybody and his great aunt starts calling their dog to tell them they're fine, system gets overloaded
No, sat-phones are based on satellites. You know, those things circling the earth, out in space. There are no landlines in space, and usually no landlines where people tend to bring their satellite phones either. Nor are there any base-stations or anything else there. If people could use a normal cell-phone, they wouldn't need to buy an expensive satellite phone.
Nah. I guess ham radio is just too boring for todays youth. Kids these days already have the Internet. Why bother with a slow, unfashionable, quirky medium that requires expensive equipment and training, when you can just drag your notebook to somewhere with wi-fi, and use fresh and fashionable GUIs to talk to someone who is actually your age (and not a boring ham-radio-geek)?
I'm sure the geeky boys did flint-knapping 10000 years ago. The world has moved on. No matter how much you simplify the requirements to be a licensed flint-knapper, you won't be able to recruite more kids.
Not only that, but we now have some sort of government-manufactured rule-based system that assigns risk to 'potential terrorists'. Just wait for the inevitable leak of their methodology (via stolen laptops, incompetence, etc.) and you just gave real terrorists a way to evade suspicion. That's the problem with any "model" for suspicious behavior -- once its known, it's easily exploited.
Unfortunately for your theory, you usually can't choose someone with specified criteria to become terrorists (such as e.g. a white soccer-mum). Assume for the moment, that you are an Al-Queda terrorist recruiter. How are you going to find your terrorists? I'll bet lots of the criteria the US terrorist hunters use, are the same you will use before you ask someone to blow stuff up. Because if you ask someone who is not a terrorist-sympathizer, chances are, they will tell on you. Personality traits isn't a theoretical exercize in cryptography.
one reasonable and one absurd, you should deliberately understand it in the reasonable way, rather than the absurd way
good point.
Calling me an anal-retentive logician is rather rude, in my opinion (I understand that it may not be in yours, so I am trying to politely inform you of my feelings on the matter). I would also appreciate an apology for the flame, but OTOH, I certainly don't expect one (this being the internet, after all).
It was not intended as a flame. It was not intended to be rude to you. I apologize.
You still didn't read or invert correctly. "Never A when B" does not mean "It's ok to A when not B."
It certainly implies something to the effect. In common parlance, "never do A when B" would also imply that "it's ok to do B whenever not A". E.g. "never drive when drunk" implies that "(in general) it's ok to drive when not drunk". And "never accept candy from strangers" implies that "it's ok to receive candy from people you know well". Alternatively, try to explain the difference to a kid.
Obviously you can construct absurd counterexamples, such as "Never put a sharp object into your eye on tuesdays", which should obviously not be interpreted to mean that it's ok to put sharp objects into your eye on other weekdays. But that is not the typical way we use language. If you say "never start a war when you have diplomatic success", this WILL imply that "(in general) it's ok to start wars whenever you're not having diplomatic success". That is, unless you are an anal-retentive logician, who analyses sentences with boolean logic instead of their common everyday meaning.
No, what he said is, "never start a war when you're having diplomatic success." I'm sure that you can see that your statement ("into deepshit diplomatic trouble") is not even close.
So does that mean that it's ok to start wars whenever your diplomacy is ok or worse (e.g. so-so, not too good, i've seen worse, bad, horrible, disaster, catastrophy), but not when it's a "success"? To be perfectly honest, I think such a guideline is totally wonky. I have a few suggestions for better guidelines, though
Never start a war
Never start a war you can't win
Never start a war unless you've got the UN on your side
Never start a war unless it's necessary for you to be re-elected
Never start something you can't finish
and so on...
Note that the original suggestion is not on the list
Oh, so it was the generals who wanted to go to war? And here I thought it was the neocons that wanted it? Thank you for this important correction to my obviously faulty perspective.
Bush made one of the classic blunders: Never start a war when you are having diplomatic success.
So you should only start wars when you are into deepshit diplomatic trouble? Does that mean it's time for US to start yet another war?
The problem is that the Bush adminstrations leap to left was matched by the Democratic Party's wild flailing to the outer most fringes of the left.
You obviously don't know what left means. If the democrats are leftists, then the pope is a black lesbian woman. I know, US politics have always been different (from e.g. european, asian, african, canadian, or south-american politics), but even within the US, "the outer most fringes of the left" are certainly not found within the democratic party.
Yeah, I know one professor who is doing some mechanical stress simulations in access+vb:/. I WAS shocked when he told me. I couldn't convince him to learn a compiled language like C, because "it was too hard".
I agree with him. C is not easy. It is a language for programmers, not for people that are mainly into e.g. mechanical stress simulations. Granted, with appropriate libraries, and all that, you could make an environment suitable for mechanical stress simulations, using C as a base language. But unless you already have that environment, and are able to show it to him, there's no reason for him to start learning C.
I suggest you try to show him MATLAB instead, and see if he's more impressed this time. (And the matlab compiler makes this a "compiled" language too, if "compiled" is of importance to you (I assume it's totally unimportant to him)).
Kids don't like to be different. If you decide to call your kid something "distinctive", they might be a target for teasing by other children. Also, the anonymity of being called Bob Smith has its own benefits. If the kid later wants to build an online identity, there's nothing stopping them from calling themselves FantasticBrilliantPerson whenever they are online.
Forge is NOT my real name but you guys already know that right ???
How the fuck would I know what ever fucking names you have? This is an international forum, and if people can be named Krishnamurti, Xien, Mboko, or Banana, they can certainly be called Forge. And even though this is slashdot, and everyone associates "forge" with sourceforge, it's still true that Beowulf is the name of a person, and the aggregation of computers is named from him (or by the poem of the same name).
More importantly, I couldn't care less what your real name is;-)
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Itanium was a fairly good idea. That it didn't work out, could just as well be ascribed to politics and real-world issues, as to technical issues. For example, the requirements said it should be able to run x86 unmodified (why? if you want x86 you already know where to get it, right?). It was oversold (the next desktop processor), and underperformed (late delivery, bad performance). None of these issues indicate that explicit instruction level paralellism (EPIC) is a bad idea. And they certainly have good Itanium compilers now. The main problem with Itanium (apart from the initial delays) was that it was a solution in search of a problem. It still is. But what a marvellous solution!
The same as the problem of changing units. Despite having officially converted to the metric system, americans still use fahrenheit, feet, and gallons.
Time is perhaps the most important measurement unit in modern life. You get up at 06:00, start work at 8:00, lunch at 11:00, and drive home at 16:00. During workday you have scheduled three meetings at 8:15, 9:30, and 14:30. You have dinner at 17:00, and drive your kids to football practice at 18:00. Your favourite tv show starts at 21:00, and you go to bed at 23:00. If you start using your own metric time, you are not making society more "efficient", instead you are efficiently leaving yourself outside it (the society, that is).
You might be a professional with computers. But the reason Nokia isn't happy with the ogg format has nothing to do with computers. Technically speaking, ogg delivers lossy compressed audio with adequate compression and sound quality. The reason Nokia doesn't like it is for reasons outside your limited little technical universe. If you are unable to see that, you can't call yourself a professional in this context.
What the fuck do I care about you mom?I don't care. I've never seen a .vorbis file. All I've ever seen is a .ogg file, .ogg files contain music that plays well on my computer, but unlike .mp3-files, not so well on my mp3-player.
Look, if you can't handle that 99% of the world just doesn't care about containers and codecs, but use the file extension to determine media format, you are seriously lacking in social intelligence, and need to be confined to live in solitude for the rest of your life. May I suggest a career in computers?
Look, you can do whatever you want to do. I'm not in any way complaining about, or suggesting a better way, to do Perl6 development, as I have absolutely no stake in it, and just don't care anymore. I'm merely pointing out that the Perl6 crowd has, due to the second-system effect, painted themselves into the corner of irrelevancy. If some of the Perl6 people feel offended by that, that's ok by me, as I'm not afraid of offending someone, although it was not my goal in this case.
I'm shure you know what I was referring to. That one of them is open source and the other is not, is irrelevant in that respect (although I certainly consider the distinction important in other respects, but that was not what I was referring to). I doubt any Duke Nukem fans would be satisfied if 3D Realms released a version of the game as unfinished as the current version of Perl6, even if it was open source.
Look, I'm not against people having fun trying to make Perl6, I'm just a bit tired of hearing people advocating it, when there's still close to nothing to show for it after 7 years of planning and some rudimentary prototyping.
Actually, I think he had a point. I'm an emacs user myself, and I've certainly done my share of "manually searching and replacing" over the years. And when it comes to the majority of programs I'm working on, I rarely have any clue about what I'm doing, and can certainly not draw you a clarifying picture of anything but the very big picture. And that's the way it has to be when you are working on multiple projects with varying levels of integration. You rarely know more than one of them well.
If you take a great Taxi-driver from Madrid, and put him into a the driver seat of a cab in Quebec, a GPS would be a big productivity booster. Not all of us have the luxury of working on the same program for all of our lives.Basically, what you are saying is that your parents should have checked something like this coverage page before they spent their money. It sounds like they bought Globalsat. They should have bought Iridium.
No, sat-phones are based on satellites. You know, those things circling the earth, out in space. There are no landlines in space, and usually no landlines where people tend to bring their satellite phones either. Nor are there any base-stations or anything else there. If people could use a normal cell-phone, they wouldn't need to buy an expensive satellite phone.
Nah. I guess ham radio is just too boring for todays youth. Kids these days already have the Internet. Why bother with a slow, unfashionable, quirky medium that requires expensive equipment and training, when you can just drag your notebook to somewhere with wi-fi, and use fresh and fashionable GUIs to talk to someone who is actually your age (and not a boring ham-radio-geek)?
I'm sure the geeky boys did flint-knapping 10000 years ago. The world has moved on. No matter how much you simplify the requirements to be a licensed flint-knapper, you won't be able to recruite more kids.
It certainly implies something to the effect. In common parlance, "never do A when B" would also imply that "it's ok to do B whenever not A". E.g. "never drive when drunk" implies that "(in general) it's ok to drive when not drunk". And "never accept candy from strangers" implies that "it's ok to receive candy from people you know well". Alternatively, try to explain the difference to a kid.
Obviously you can construct absurd counterexamples, such as "Never put a sharp object into your eye on tuesdays", which should obviously not be interpreted to mean that it's ok to put sharp objects into your eye on other weekdays. But that is not the typical way we use language. If you say "never start a war when you have diplomatic success", this WILL imply that "(in general) it's ok to start wars whenever you're not having diplomatic success". That is, unless you are an anal-retentive logician, who analyses sentences with boolean logic instead of their common everyday meaning.
So does that mean that it's ok to start wars whenever your diplomacy is ok or worse (e.g. so-so, not too good, i've seen worse, bad, horrible, disaster, catastrophy), but not when it's a "success"? To be perfectly honest, I think such a guideline is totally wonky. I have a few suggestions for better guidelines, though
Note that the original suggestion is not on the list
Oh, so it was the generals who wanted to go to war? And here I thought it was the neocons that wanted it? Thank you for this important correction to my obviously faulty perspective.
So you should only start wars when you are into deepshit diplomatic trouble? Does that mean it's time for US to start yet another war?
You obviously don't know what left means. If the democrats are leftists, then the pope is a black lesbian woman. I know, US politics have always been different (from e.g. european, asian, african, canadian, or south-american politics), but even within the US, "the outer most fringes of the left" are certainly not found within the democratic party.
I agree with him. C is not easy. It is a language for programmers, not for people that are mainly into e.g. mechanical stress simulations. Granted, with appropriate libraries, and all that, you could make an environment suitable for mechanical stress simulations, using C as a base language. But unless you already have that environment, and are able to show it to him, there's no reason for him to start learning C.
I suggest you try to show him MATLAB instead, and see if he's more impressed this time. (And the matlab compiler makes this a "compiled" language too, if "compiled" is of importance to you (I assume it's totally unimportant to him)).
Kids don't like to be different. If you decide to call your kid something "distinctive", they might be a target for teasing by other children. Also, the anonymity of being called Bob Smith has its own benefits. If the kid later wants to build an online identity, there's nothing stopping them from calling themselves FantasticBrilliantPerson whenever they are online.
How the fuck would I know what ever fucking names you have? This is an international forum, and if people can be named Krishnamurti, Xien, Mboko, or Banana, they can certainly be called Forge. And even though this is slashdot, and everyone associates "forge" with sourceforge, it's still true that Beowulf is the name of a person, and the aggregation of computers is named from him (or by the poem of the same name).
More importantly, I couldn't care less what your real name is ;-)